HomeGroup: A practical guide to domestic bliss with Windows 7

Microsoft has been trying to give Windows home users a convenient, peer-to-peer networking solution since at least 2002. With Windows 7 HomeGroup, they finally got it right. Ars walks you through HomeGroup's functionality, architecture, and history.

EDIT: So it was. But I don't see how having Bonjour is a drawback to file sharing on Mac OS. If anything, it's easy to detect Windows PCs from Macs as well, ironically enough. Somehow Apple has done well enough that I never have problems connecting to either my Macs or Windows computers at home. They just work... all the time

What the heck am I supposed to make of 'completely painless local file sharing' for Mac OS? It either works, or it doesn't.

I think Microsoft would rather have this sharing built by themselves and into Windows and rely on 3rd party software as little as possible. After using Homegroup to share files with my desktop and my sister's laptop (which was incredibly easy and fast), I don't really care how many tools there are, as long as there is one that solves a problem as simply and easily as possible.

Homegroup is clever, but why do I have to go around plugging in a password? Bonjour works with no additional effort.

Having to join everyone up gains nothing, and is only likely to break eventually.

Bonjour? That crapware that Apple throws on everyone's computer if they want to use iTunes? That's one of the reasons I no longer use it. And, you want your computer open to the network WITHOUT a password? -_-

I've been using HomeGroup since I started using Windows 7, and it's amazingly simple to set up.

I have heard that there is one niggle that can catch users off-guard - the Windows clocks need to be synchronized. There is a little wiggle room (I've seen a minute in either direction), and I've heard people tell me that it's totally untrue, so I'm not entirely sure - I've never bothered to test it (as I like having all my clocks in sync anyways).

Otherwise, HomeGroup has been a huge win for networking. I love the disgusted faces they often give me: "Oh Windows sharing? It sucks!", as I proceed to demonstrate how easy it is with HomeGroup.

Now, I haven't ever gotten it to work with password protected file sharing on, but presumably the HomeGroup is secure enough to permit a read-only share.

And, indeed, it either "works or it doesn't" - the worst I've ever had to do was have everyone leave and rejoin - someone made their own Homegroup with the same password at their own house, and they appeared to clash.

There's the occasional niggle, but that does come as a consequence of a smarter system - and there's no way anyone would let Windows implement a Bonjour-like network security stack, with no security.

Indeed, Windows PC's come on a randomized HomeGroup even - I'm guessing a network administrator would appreciate that, as opposed to everything being in the same Homegroup by default, as per WORKGROUP.

Homegroup is clever, but why do I have to go around plugging in a password? Bonjour works with no additional effort.

Having to join everyone up gains nothing, and is only likely to break eventually.

Bonjour? That crapware that Apple throws on everyone's computer if they want to use iTunes? That's one of the reasons I no longer use it. And, you want your computer open to the network WITHOUT a password? -_-

Actually Bonjour works fine, if you had ever used it you would know there is no reason to call it crapware. You would also know that the computers are NOT open on the network without a password, it uses your local credentials to authenticate you on the remote system and prompts if it does not recognize you. Read the article carefully and you might understand that it is not criticizing W7 or even making fun of it for finally catching up to 21st century protocols, so you don't need to jump to its defense.

Homegroup is clever, but why do I have to go around plugging in a password? Bonjour works with no additional effort.

Having to join everyone up gains nothing, and is only likely to break eventually.

Bonjour? That crapware that Apple throws on everyone's computer if they want to use iTunes? That's one of the reasons I no longer use it. And, you want your computer open to the network WITHOUT a password? -_-

Actually Bonjour works fine, if you had ever used it you would know there is no reason to call it crapware. You would also know that the computers are NOT open on the network without a password, it uses your local credentials to authenticate you on the remote system and prompts if it does not recognize you. Read the article carefully and you might understand that it is not criticizing W7 or even making fun of it for finally catching up to 21st century protocols, so you don't need to jump to its defense.

Actually Bonjour works fine if you're ONLY using OS X. Otherwise, it never seems to work right.

Just about every term used is described, but then near the end of the article there is this sentence "But whereas the Rally technologies are built around the Peer Name Resolution Protocol, which operates much like a distributed hash table, Bonjour is built atop existing Domain Name System (DNS) standards." I can surmise from this that Rally technologies is a umbrella term used for the various standards that comprise HomeGroup, but the term appears no where else in the article.

And to those of you wondering why Microsoft reinvented the wheel instead of using Bonjour, I can offer this minor insight. Bonjour is very convenient, but it's also a bit promiscuous. One nice thing about Bonjour using IPv4 is that it can be accessed remotely. One bad thing about Bonjour... it can be accessed remotely. I've read about some other security issues with Bonjour as well. One thing HomeGroup has going for it (security-wise) is that in its current implementation it runs only on private IPv6 networks. For its intended purpose this seems like a perfectly reasonable way to increase security.

Not sure if any of you tried... if you hit advance sharing in properties and look into cahching options, you can let other people in your home group access folders offline. Recently I've setup my photos to be that way and a beautiful thing happened... all the other computers in the homegroup that accessed that folder automatically made it available offline without any extra steps.

Just about every term used is described, but then near the end of the article there is this sentence "But whereas the Rally technologies are built around the Peer Name Resolution Protocol, which operates much like a distributed hash table, Bonjour is built atop existing Domain Name System (DNS) standards." I can surmise from this that Rally technologies is a umbrella term used for the various standards that comprise HomeGroup, but the term appears no where else in the article.

Yeah, sorry about that -- Rally is a pretty big topic on its own. It covers everything from traffic prioritization on a local network (e.g. ensure time-sensitive stuff like streaming video is given priority over, say, file transfer traffic), to automatic configuration of wireless access points, to presenting USB-connected devices over a network and making them behave as if they were connected to the local computer.

Taken together, you can think of it as the technological goo that brings together all the devices and services on a local network. It's all evolved over several years but, IMO, Windows 7 is the first operating system release where it feels like they're turning all that work into something that's actually useful on a daily basis to a lot of people.

Didn't know about this. Personally I've never really had any issues at all with file sharing the old and primitive Windows way, with the exception that I have problems with my Macbook Pro. Specifically, if I have it connected to the network over wireless and I leave it with a windows share open and close the lid, when I come back a few hours later you can almost guarantee that OSX will be in some kind of bizzare quasi-state where it thinks the share is still connected when in fact it is not. The only way to fix it once this problem happens is a hard reset of the mac - if you try and reboot normally, the first thing it does is try and close the share that it doesn't have open, which will cause the machine to hang forever.

I've never been able to figure out if it's some kind of name resolution problem, networking issue, something with Apple's shoddy implementation of Samba (it got worse when I moved to Win7 and it would happen 100% of the time when my Win7 shares required a username & password to connect) or something else entirely.

Wouldn't mind checking this out to see if it fixes the issue, but unfortunately one of my family members is still on Vista with both her Desktop & Laptop. I feel sorry for her, but not sorry enough to shell out the upgrade tax on her behalf.

I really really wanted to use Homegroups, but I can't because it only works across the same subnet (what, you don't have 3 wireless networks and a wired network in your house?). There are some weird things with Windows 7 networking and some devices: I ended up referring to my server by IP (10.x.y.z) rather than by hostname in my home theatre setup (squeezebox, popcorn hour) -- it was the path of least resistance.

My big problem is that my main computer gets its internet connection through ICS via a LAN connection on my laptop. My laptop is able to join the homegroup fine but for some reason my ics pc isn't able to join the homegroup. I use my lappy as a wireless conection and as a keyboard with synergy. For some reason I just can't get the shared printer to populated on my ics'd pc. Halp?

Rally is a pretty big topic on its own. It covers everything from traffic prioritization on a local network (e.g. ensure time-sensitive stuff like streaming video is given priority over, say, file transfer traffic), to automatic configuration of wireless access points, to presenting USB-connected devices over a network and making them behave as if they were connected to the local computer.

This is a lot more than what we call a network, because it could extend to simple things like the new Apple TV (or Roku or Xbox.) But I could buy a new TV only to turn it on and have it shout out "I need this much bandwidth with this much latency" and in theory with most decices cooperating, with little configuration my new TV is on my network and streaming, No IPs, no DHCP, no routers.

But even something much more routine could connect in. My car for example may know it doesn't have enough fuel to get me to work that morning. It'd send out its message and my phone would alert me to allow another 5 minutes to stop off.

With XML I can see this system being infinately extensible. Does Bonjour use fixed profiles and features in the same way Bluetooth does?

Homegroups does have its drawbacks (not working with any of my antique XP "server" machines being one of them) but it is the smoothest way to handle home networking in Windows that I've seen so far. While I liked bonjour on my old OSX laptop, it still suffered from some unreliability issues. Getting it to work in my old office - between my supervisor's laptop, the accountant's system, and my own work issue MBP was beyond problematic.

One thing that does concern me with homegroups is the lack of obvious troubleshooting steps, should something go wrong. Its a configuration that is just supposed to "work" - and being that it has simply worked thus far, I haven't amassed the knowledge, documentation, and library of quick fixes and workarounds that comprised my knowledge of old style Windows file sharing. As long as it keeps working fine, I'll count the lack of necessary troubleshooting knowledge as a blessing rather than a curse.

Oh, and a closing shout to the author - thanks for the excellent article. These "peek behind the curtain" tech guides from those more knowledgeable than I keep me on top of my technology knowledge, and give me something to research while working the redeye shift.

Homegroup is clever, but why do I have to go around plugging in a password? Bonjour works with no additional effort.

Having to join everyone up gains nothing, and is only likely to break eventually.

Bonjour? That crapware that Apple throws on everyone's computer if they want to use iTunes? That's one of the reasons I no longer use it. And, you want your computer open to the network WITHOUT a password? -_-

Quite frankly it's not. You have to enter a password. However, I'm amused that Windows makes you use the password they give you instead of a password of your choosing. Network file sharing on Mac has been around at least since Tiger (I never tried it prior to that so it may not have been there) and it's been painless since then as well. As regards a single standard, well, the latecomer is responsible for that.

Homegroup is clever, but why do I have to go around plugging in a password? Bonjour works with no additional effort.

Having to join everyone up gains nothing, and is only likely to break eventually.

Bonjour? That crapware that Apple throws on everyone's computer if they want to use iTunes? That's one of the reasons I no longer use it. And, you want your computer open to the network WITHOUT a password? -_-

Quite frankly it's not. You have to enter a password. However, I'm amused that Windows makes you use the password they give you instead of a password of your choosing. Network file sharing on Mac has been around at least since Tiger (I never tried it prior to that so it may not have been there) and it's been painless since then as well. As regards a single standard, well, the latecomer is responsible for that.

You can set your own password for Homegroup. I believe it can be done during setup, or you can simply click "change the password" in the Homegroup settings. Note, if you do this, you'll have to touch each computer already joined to the Homegroup to modify their passwords.

Anyone using HomeGroup note that it uses the Sharing Wizard introduced in Vista to share files which doesn't set advanced permissions like "Authenticated users" which prompt for credentials on older SMB style sharing. This document here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/deta ... laylang=en states that HomeGroup shared files can be accessed by older OSes using standard file sharing and shows how to do that. I've followed the exact step but when I share for example, some pictures from the Pictures library using HomeGroup on my Windows 7 computer, my entire users folder (%userprofile%) is shared/made available on the home network and accessible using any XP or Vista computer in the *workgroup*. I only want specific pictures or only those files I shared thru HomeGroup to be shared, but my entire user profile folder gets shared. This is true for Vista too if you use the Sharing Wizard but for HomeGroup, there seems to be no way to share using *Advanced sharing*. If this is a bug, this poses a privacy risk because files I don't want to be shared are also being shared.

A Google search for: HomeGroup users folder confirms this serious security/privacy risk in Windows 7. Of what use is setting a password for Homegroup if read+write permissions are given to "everyone" via workgroup/SMB sharing? The permissions need to be given to "Authenticated users". Once you share anything through HomeGroup, it's shared to Everyone on the network with Write permissions. In short, HomeGroup is designed for sharing in a closed/private/home network behind a NAT/router. Don't use it on public networks or even on home networks where you need maximum security.

Actually Bonjour works fine if you're ONLY using OS X. Otherwise, it never seems to work right.

Not true. There are up to 4 macs on my home network and two FreeBSD servers. All use Bonjour/zeroconf and have no issues finding each other. The FBSD boxes even advertise what services they are running - for example, if you were to walk in here with a laptop running Safari and pulled down the "bonjour" bookmark, you'd see an option to connect to my sabnzbd instance and the mt-daapd config interface and the web root of a web devel environment. If you had a terminal app that supported bonjour, you'd see both FBSD boxes offering up ssh. It has been completely trouble-free. I totally ditched the internal dns setup I used to run.

Try printer sharing on a Mac in a mixed network with several Windows machines. It is an absolute nightmare. Such a simple task is very easy on the Windows side but exceedingly difficult on Snow Leopard.

I've had very few problems with the old Windows files sharing, other than the fact that it is a bit slow and the disc caching is sub-optimal. The old way was also easy -- properties->sharing, pick a few permissions and people, and you're done.

One thing I've never understood about the Windows Network Printer model is, why bother installing the driver on every machine? What I mean is, obviously you need to have the driver on at least ONE computer (logically, the computer that the printer actually attaches to). Once the driver is setup on that computer, all the rest of the computers *could* theoretically, send print jobs to that computer in a standardized document format (like Microsofts own XPS format, or PDF, PS, etc). When network printing, the other computers send the print job in the standardized document format, and when the computer with the printer attached received is, it could use the printer-specific-driver to send the pages to the printer.

It seems like the obvious solution to all those driver problems, so why didn't microsoft do that years ago? The only reason I can figure is to allow printer makers to make printer-specific features that need the driver installed locally in order to present those capabilities to the end-user (things like, I dunno, showing how much ink is left in the printer perhaps)?

Trouble is most of the problems don't come from sharing files with just other pc's running the same Windows version.

It's sharing and connecting to other sources. Windows has an annoying habit of caching creditentials but giving no UI to change or manage them, or not even providing a UI in the first place.

HomeGroup might be fine, but what about talking to the 360? or the PS3? or your media box? etc it does nothing, in fact it makes it worse as now the GUI 'hides', or rather 'promotes' homegroup over the more traditional methods.

OSX and linux distribs tend to better at this, mainly because they aren't the major player so they have to play nice with others...Windows suffers because it only cares about Windows.

Homegroup works well for me. I never had issues setting up the old way, but it's convenient to just join a pc to the homegroup when I set it up, and not have to bother with all the user accounts and the like.

On an unrelated note, I want to mention how amazed I was as how good Win7 is compared to WinXP (Vista might be good too, never tried this) in regards to swapping hardware.My media center was a AMD Athlon X2 5050, DDR2, AMD 785 chipset. I swapped out the mobo for a Intel H55 chipset, Core i5 cpu, and DDR3 ram, and USB3. Booted the machine (actually intended to reinstall Windows right away but missed the prompt) and it loads into windows, spends about 8 minutes reloading drivers, and all done. It was cool watching the list of 25+ unknown devices all get cleaned up in device manager.

We all know Win7 is great at finding drivers, but I had no idea it could handle whole cpu/chipset swaps so easily. The Media center is working great after the swap.

"The "member info" message is broadcast by members of the HomeGroup, informing other computers of its Windows computer name, as well as its "peer id." This identifier is determined by Peer-To-Peer Grouping when joining a HomeGroup, and uniquely identifies the computer. This is another important departure from NetBIOS—a computer's name is only really used for display purposes but is not actually used for communicating."

Question : What happens to UNC names, say I have 2 computers with the same name joined on the same HomeGroup; typing the UNC to access the share would give me access to which of the two?

Of what use is setting a password for Homegroup if read+write permissions are given to "everyone" via workgroup/SMB sharing?

Don't forget that with Windows' file sharing security model, the most restrictive set of permissions (at both the share level and the NTFS level) is applied to access attempts.

That's why in most Windows file sharing scenarios the common advice is to give "Everyone" "Modify" (or even "Full Control") access at the share level and apply your real restrictions at the NTFS level. It doesn't matter if "Everyone" has "Full Control" on the share if only certain users have Modify access at the NTFS level.

Homegroup is clever, but why do I have to go around plugging in a password? Bonjour works with no additional effort.

Having to join everyone up gains nothing, and is only likely to break eventually.

Bonjour? That crapware that Apple throws on everyone's computer if they want to use iTunes? That's one of the reasons I no longer use it. And, you want your computer open to the network WITHOUT a password? -_-

Actually Bonjour works fine, if you had ever used it you would know there is no reason to call it crapware. You would also know that the computers are NOT open on the network without a password, it uses your local credentials to authenticate you on the remote system and prompts if it does not recognize you. Read the article carefully and you might understand that it is not criticizing W7 or even making fun of it for finally catching up to 21st century protocols, so you don't need to jump to its defense.

If you've ever used Bonjour on Windows in a corporate environment, you'd realize that many IT departments ban Bonjour (and therefore iTunes as well) because Bonjour does NOT play well with other software. For example, having Bonjour on your machine completely disrupts (how, I have no idea but it does) certain widely used VPN software packages and given that VPN software is something the business requires and Bonjour is not, it's a trivial exercise to see which one gets punted.

One thing I've never understood about the Windows Network Printer model is, why bother installing the driver on every machine? What I mean is, obviously you need to have the driver on at least ONE computer (logically, the computer that the printer actually attaches to).

There are generic drivers that can be used to avoid this, but each printer has various settings that may be unique, like the ability to print two sided, options for conserving ink (draft mode, etc.), ability to print larger page sizes, envelope handling, minimum margins, etc. Although I understand it isn't necessarily the driver that captures this info, setting up the driver also tells windows what options are available so you get the appropriate options and warnings.

If you've ever used Bonjour on Windows in a corporate environment, you'd realize that many IT departments ban Bonjour (and therefore iTunes as well) because Bonjour does NOT play well with other software. For example, having Bonjour on your machine completely disrupts (how, I have no idea but it does) certain widely used VPN software packages and given that VPN software is something the business requires and Bonjour is not, it's a trivial exercise to see which one gets punted.

I created a home group on my desktop, wrote down the password, went laptop #1, put in the password "there was an error". Laptop #2? Same - "there was an error". I forget the actual error message, but it was no more descriptive than "There was an error". It simply just didn't work. "Diagnose" didn't fix it either.

Now I read here that all this depends on IPv6, and I may have turned off v6 on the desktop in an attempt to stop a crash/hang bug (an unsuccessful attempt) - so perhaps I should revisit this and make sure IPv6 is on and working.

But still, even if this was the cause shouldn't the home group creation wizard tell you, or give you the option to enable IPv6?

It's a new Ars record: a gratuitous wife reference in the first sentence! One thing I love about reading Jacqui Cheng's articles is the absence of this 'OMG I'm writing about nerdy stuff, so better slot in a gratuitous wife reference to make sure no-one thinks I'm a no-life nerd' emotional insecurity bull.